Baltimore City Public Schools will cancel after-school activities and tutoring next week after the Trump administration backed out of promises to provide pandemic-recovery funding for schools around the country.

Tutoring for 1,100 Baltimore students during the school day at 25 sites will end by the middle of next week. On Friday, the school system will close after-school programs for 3,000 students at 44 schools and one virtual program, according to Alison Perkins-Cohen, the city schools chief of staff.

No city school staff will be laid off, because the tutoring and after-school programs are provided by vendors, although some city school employees work in the after-school programs to supplement their income.

Baltimore City was the first school system to announce actions to immediately stem the spending.

On Monday, the Trump administration said it was reneging on a promise to give Maryland schools up to $418 million in pandemic recovery funds, even though some of the money has already been spent.

The action creates at least a $305 million hole in the current year’s education budgets that state and local leaders are now trying to figure out how to fill.

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In a letter sent last week, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the federal government had changed course, deciding it should not have extended the time that schools had to spend the money. The letter arrived at 5:03 p.m. last Friday and said that all reimbursements would end at 5 p.m., making it too late for Maryland to request any other payments.

The federal government had promised the city $700 million during the pandemic. The city has spent and been reimbursed for all but $48 million. Perkins-Cohen said the city had spent $32 million of that $48 million by the end of March and will send the receipts to the state asking for reimbursement.

The remainder was paying for ongoing work that had already been contracted out, including the tutoring and after-school activities for students.

They are canceling those programs so as not to incur more expenses that they don’t have the money budgeted for in the current fiscal year.

Some of the work can’t be immediately canceled. For instance, Perkins-Cohen said, the school system has contracts to renovate some school health suites. Some of them have been gutted but not finished. “You can’t leave the school without a health suite, so we’re going to have to finish that work” she said.

To do that work, the city schools will have to move money around in the budget, cutting other expenses to pay the bills since the federal government pulled out of its commitments.

The school system is keeping the after-school programs open until spring break begins to give families more time to arrange for after-school care for their children, Perkins-Cohen said.

“We wanted to give them as much notice as we could because, of course, these are working families. They rely on after-school [care] to be able to be at their jobs,” she said.

The majority of the programs were held in elementary schools and provided students with academic enrichment programs, school officials said.

The tutoring — for groups of four or less — is being given to students who are academically behind and is focused on math and reading.

Research had shown that the tutoring was one of the most effective methods of catching students up after the pandemic. The city schools invested heavily in tutoring, and school officials believe it got results. Baltimore was among only a handful of urban school districts in the country to post higher test scores in reading on a national test than before the pandemic.

Perkins-Cohen said the school system had been prepared to spend all of its money by the original deadline of last year, but asked for and received an extension so that it could analyze what type of tutoring was having the greatest success. All of the tutoring and after-school activities were expected to stop at the end of this school year, she said.

All 24 school systems in the state received money to pay for initiatives that include tutoring, social-emotional wellness programs and summer learning. Some got approval to use the funds to renovate school buildings. Baltimore City, along with Baltimore, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, had been given the most funding.

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.